Sexual harassment and sexual blackmail at work

This note presents the results, referred to the years 2015-2016, of the estimate of sexual harassment suffered by women and men and of women victims of sexual blackmail at work.

It is estimated that 8,816,000 women between 14 and 65 years of age (43.6%) were victims of sexual harassment in the course of their lives. In the last three years they were 3,118,000 (15.4%).

Considering only the same sexual harassment forms detected in the 2008-2009 survey, data showed a significant decline. The percentage of women victims of sexual harassment decreased from 18.7% in the three years prior to 2008-2009 to 12,8% in the three years prior to 2015-2016.

Men victims of sexual harassment were 3,754,000 (18.8%) in the course of their life, 1,274,000 (6.4%) in the last three years.

Perpetrators of sexual harassment were mostly men: they were for 97% of the victims women and for the 85,4% of the victims men.

Verbal harassment is
the most common form both of sexual harassment suffered during life (24% for women and 8.2% for men), followed by unwanted touching (15.9% of women and by 3.6% of men).

60% of unwanted touching were made by strangers, 15.8% by people who know each other only by sight; the most frequent places where they occurred were the public transport (27.9%) for women while for men were clubs such as pubs, nightclubs, bars (29.2% in the course of life).

The perception of the severity of physical harassment was very different considering men and women: 76.4% of women considered them very or fairly serious against 47.2% of men.

Other forms of harassment were those perpetrated through the Web: 6.8% of women had inappropriate proposals or obscene or malicious comments on their account through social networks and to 1.5% of women happened that someone used their accounts (identity theft) to send embarrassing or threatening or offensive messages to other people. In this case, data regarding men are not
particularly different (respectively 2.2% and 1.9%).
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